Backstabbing for Beginners, by Michael Soussan (Nation Books, £9.99)

"Getting the facts straight was one thing. Translating them into UN-speak was another." The author of this memoir worked for the UN Oil for Food programme and then publicly joined calls for it to be investigated when evidence of its systematic corruption was unearthed after the Iraq war. At the book's dramatic centre is a glorious portrait of Soussan's boss, Benon V Sevan or "Pasha", who uses the word "facking" in every sentence, blows cigar smoke in people's faces, and blasts a proposal to feed Iraqis canned cheese to smithereens with the sheer force of his righteous scorn.

When it finally turns out that Pasha, too, was on the payroll, there is a real sadness to the writing, which has otherwise been alternately chirpy (telling boisterous anecdotes of office politics), crisp (explaining the detailed logistics of how Oil for Food worked), annoying (transliterating "comedy" French accents for no good reason), and strangely obscure (apparently sympathising with the poor US against French diplomatic jiujitsu in the run-up to the war). It is a story of lost illusions, and a comedy of human failings in a really big office: "In the organisation dedicated to world peace, bureaucrats could sit in adjacent offices . . . and hate each other's guts as a result of perceived insults contained in memos."

What Is This Thing Called Happiness?, by Fred Feldman (Oxford, £27.50)

It is not, argues the philosopher author, a kind of whole-life satisfaction, or the simple preponderance of pleasure over pain. So what exactly is happiness? According to Feldman, Beaker (a Muppet) is happy to the degree that he is "occurrently intrinsically attudinally pleased" about various things at a particular time. "Occurently" means that Beaker is actually thinking about the things, and "attitudinally" means that we are talking about Beaker's opinions, rather than his mere sensory comfort. A reader might have trouble with this account who doubts whether it is possible to think of more than one thing at any given moment (and thus that more than one of what Feldman calls the "atoms" of happiness can enter into one of his calculations); or who suspects that "happy right now" is at best a thin version of the concept.

Happily, Feldman is a charming writer, with a knack for compelling and often amusing thought experiments, and scrupulous about what his theory might and might not be good for. Some of it, he accepts, depends on "linguistic intuition": our ordinary understanding of language. My own linguistic intuition yelped in pain at the occurrence of unlovely terms such as "happifying", but the displeasure was fleeting.

Spider Silk, by Leslie Brunette & Catherine L Craig (Yale, £20)

Spyder, spyder, burning bright: this book's beautiful colour plates include a lampshade spider's extraordinary three-dimensional web (fearful symmetry indeed), a gladiator spider holding out its net to fling over prey, and a jumping spider in mid-leap, ready to brake with its webline. The book is a lesson in evolution, as new kinds of silk and new ways to use them give rise to thousands of species over the ages.

The authors delve into the genetics of the proteins that constitute the various silks, as strong as Kevlar or more flexible than any man-made substance (four different silks are used by the common garden spider to build its spiral snare). Spare a thought for spiders trapped in the even more perilous webs of human curiosity: "When researchers disturbed copulating midget funnel-web tarantulas . . . the female immediately attacked and killed the male." More deadlier indeed, as the man sang.